The Internet and the World Wide Web (www) have had a dramatic effect on corporate networks, with companies using them for electronic commerce and Internet access as well as client/server applications and traditional network services such as e-mail. Efficient systems and network management practices can cut and control costs by enabling efficient asset management practices, reducing the need for labor-intensive tasks such as the installation, maintenance, and reconfiguration of software, minimizing the cost of wide area data communication links, minimizing the cost of systems related downtime, providing the proper level of services, and much more.
Installing and maintaining software in an enterprise network is a major cost to corporations with locations across a wide geographical area. This is because most of the cost of maintaining a corporate computer system typically comes from software installation, support, and maintenance. Several vendors offer enterprise-wide management solutions to install and maintain software applications across the enterprise.
Unfortunately, conventional enterprise-wide management software installation and maintenance techniques are substantially limited in that they typically require a considerable and possibly prohibitive amount of enterprise network bandwidth to communicate large amounts of data across the enterprise network to perform such software installation, updates, or repairs.
For instance, conventional enterprise-wide management techniques to install, update, or repair software applications typically involve sending complete software packages to any number of source file distribution points (DPs) in the enterprise. A full software package includes, for example, one or more complete software applications along with all of the corresponding files (e.g., data, configuration, scripting files, and so on) that may be needed for installation, removal, repair, or other maintenance of the included software application(s). A DP is the location from which an end-user installs software application source files for new software application installations, updates, and/or repairs. An enterprise may have thousands of DPs to service the software requirements of various networked devices (e.g., end user computers, printers and other peripheral devices, network appliances, and so on).
Each package that is communicated from the centralized source file server to a target DP, can include any number of files (e.g., possibly tens, hundreds, or thousands of files) that are required for the proper execution and configuration of the particular software application. Additionally each package's software installation/removal scripts ensure that any previously installed versions of the software application(s) are removed from the target DP, before they copy the current contents of the package onto the target DP. In light of this, it is clear that conventional enterprise-wide management software installation and maintenance techniques generally require utilization of a considerable and potentially prohibitively expensive amount of network bandwidth to install and/or maintain software at each DP in the enterprise.
These and other limitations of traditional systems and procedures to install, update, and otherwise maintain software applications across enterprise networks are addressed by the following described arrangements and procedures.